If you wish to reach out to a reference librarian at the Harvard University Archives to request access to specific materials besides the online sources listed below, they may be able to digitize something for you to view remotely. It may also be possible for eligible students (within the COVID testing protocols) to view an item on site, in the new Shared Reading Room (SRR). Arrangements must be made directly with an Archives staff member. You may contact them via email at archives_reference@harvard.edu.
Includes several useful guides pointing to Harvard University Archives collections documenting a wide range of Harvardiana, from Harvard buildings to historical disruptions to the Black student experience to Harvard Presidential Insignia, and much more.
Here you’ll find almost everything you ever wanted to know about the history of food and dining at the University. From the Early records of the Steward, 1649-1812 to Harvard's Web Archive Collection Service, the University Archives collections serve up an extensive and diverse collection of material related to eating, drinking, and being merry across centuries and dining rooms.
Find more materials in Harvard University Archives' collections by searching HOLLIS. Try the following keywords:
The Archive of World Music at Loeb Music Library collects archival field recordings of musics worldwide, as well as commercial audiovisual recordings and streaming resources of ethnomusicological interest.
The collection was established in 1976 by Professor John Ward. In 1992, with the appointment of Harvard's first senior professor of ethnomusicology, the collection moved to the Loeb Music Library.
The Archive has developed important collections from Asia and the Middle East. It holds diverse archival material, such as wide-ranging Chinese songs acquired by Harvard Professor Emeritus Rulan Pian; extensive field recordings made by Martha Forsyth in 1980s of traditional Bulgarian songs; field recordings of Tvisöngur (male polyphony in Iceland); and !Kung field recordings. Numerous recordings of Indonesian music have also been acquired, primarily on commercial sound cassettes.
Books and scores documenting British and Scottish ballads collected by Harvard's first professor of English, Francis James Child, as well as ballads he collected from North America, most prominently in New England. You may listen to recordings of some of these via Smithsonian Global Sound. See also: The "Ballads" Tab in the "Finding Primary Sources" section of the "Verbal Lore" page of this guide.
Harvard Library holds a significant number of original and unpublished Celtic folklore materials. These include collections of Scottish Gaelic recordings, as well as Irish manuscript and sound recordings, and fieldwork collected in Welsh Patagonia in the 1960s. The recordings in Harvard Library have been digitized and can be accessed from the page linked here.
The Americas, Europe and Oceania Division is home to many distinctive collections that offer researchers unique materials of historical, scholarly or simply curiosity value. Among those one can find colonial African trade cards and Russian food ration cards from the 1990s, multicultural comics and political posters from various countries, Czech and Slovak samizdat brochures and Danish LGBT scrapbooks, German theater posters and one of four surviving copies of the Album comique pour les Affaires étrangères by Joseph Gabriel-Hippolyte Mollard (Paris, 1869) to name a few. Find something you'd like to examine? Search HOLLIS or ask Ramona.
Historic Cookbooks at Schlesinger Library
Start your research on historic cookbooks with this guide. The Schlesinger Library holds more than 100,000 volumes, ranging from rare 16th-century texts to 21st-century titles. Approximately 20,000 of these volumes are cookbooks or food-related. Many of the titles highlighted in this guide were included in an exhibition at the Schlesinger Library, Cookbooks to Treasure: Culinary Rarities from the Schlesinger Library, from December 2015 to February 2016.
Historical Textbooks Collection at Gutman Library
This collection of nearly 45,000 elementary and secondary textbooks covers subject areas from agriculture to zoology. The collection contains materials published in the United States in English from 1776 through 1985. A small number of European imprints in foreign languages are also included.
Houghton Library is the principal repository for Harvard University's collections of rare books and manuscripts. The "Compass" resource archived here was an attempt to offer interesting inroads for every Harvard undergraduate student, no matter what concentration or disciplinary interest, into Houghton Library's collections. The guide took all 48 Harvard undergraduate concentrations as of 2019 and made suggestions for interesting and engaging collection materials for that area of study. Collected by the Harvard University Archives as part of the records of Houghton Library. See Also: Houghton Library: A Student's Guide.
Indigenous Knowledge Collection
The Indigenous Knowledge Collection at Tozzer Library highlights diverse voices across Native American and Global Indigenous communities as a way to engage with contemporary issues and topics as created by Indigenous voices. This collection strives to incorporate not just diverse Native voices within academic texts but diverse materials themselves, such as board games, comics, zines, and more.
The largest single repository of South Slavic heroic song in the world, this collection comprises four separate collections, all of which are housed in Widener Library, Room C. These include: 1) Milman Parry's texts and recordings of oral literature in Yugoslavia, 2) Albert Lord's Albanian Collection of dictated epic texts, Albert Lord's Yugoslavia Collection of songs, and, 4) the Lord and Bynum Collection of texts from Yugoslavia, among other materials.
Peter J. Solomon Collection of Children's Literature
The collection includes original drawings for book illustrations, manuscripts and letters by Beatrix Potter, Edward Lear, John Tenniel, Lewis Carroll, Jean de Brunhoff, Garth Williams, Maurice Sendak, and Nancy Ekholm Burkert, as well as the the suppressed 1865 edition of Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll's pocket watch that evokes the one consulted by the March Hare. It also includes contemporary children's books by Ashley Bryan, Brenda Child, Lulu Delacre, Julie Flett, Jessica Love, Jerry Pinkney, and Dan Santat, among other materials.